![]() ![]() Each upgrade is almost negligibly beneficial on its own, but stacks with other upgrades (and your character's skills) to create more significant bonuses. Between missions you can upgrade your soldiers with new sights, stocks, magazines and barrels. The game also has a poor interface for managing equipment. This isn't helped by the new enemy types who join the fight being mostly just the same as the one-hit mooks you can kill in their thousands, just vastly more bullet-spongey. By the 10th or 15th time you find yourself having to advance through a level ahead of a creeping bomb barrage, or rescue captured soldiers from sarcophaguses, or blow up a tank of alien goo, the sheen has well and truly come off the game, replaced by the merciless grind. The first time you play them, these are great fun. Story missions are comparatively rare, with the game auto-generating several random skirmishes from a number of set types between narrative missions. If this was down to a complex and engrossing narrative, that would be great, but it's not the case. Whilst most Gears games clock in at around 10 hours or less, Gears Tactics is three times as long. The problem more stems from the game's decidedly unnecessary length. Still, for the most part the turn-based action is fine and entertaining. The overwatch system feels decidedly inept as well, with enemies being able to move in real time as they pass through your overwatch cone, which means they can simply avoid most of your gunfire by moving at the same time, which is a novel choice in a supposedly turn-based game. There's also no bonuses for catching enemies outflanked. Sometimes an enemy will be standing out in plain sight three feet from you and your pointblank shotgun or pistol shot has a less than a 100% chance to hit. There's also limited information feedback. Instead of only having a finite number of grenades, you have infinite grenades but they're on cooldowns, with it taking 3-5 turns before you can use a grenade again. A good example is grenades and healing kits (although, in amusing Gears logic, these also take the form of grenades). The game is also obsessed with cooldowns as a way of limiting your abilities, even if this is illogical. The game's focus on real-time lines of sight rather than tiles from other tactics games means it's sometimes hard to work out if you're in an enemy's overwatch cone or not (or if leaning out of cover to shoot will put you in the cone). There are weaknesses to the mode, though. The graphics are solid, the action satisfyingly chunky and it's mostly great fun. Despite this, the game is still pleasingly tactical, with each character having a generous skill tree and lots of abilities they can develop and use. Battles are also more visceral, with a focus on melee finishers to take out injured enemies (which also grant your other characters bonus actions) and a fair bit of gore. ![]() These make battles a nimbler, more aggressive fair than many games in the genre. You get 3 actions per turn rather than the industry-standard 2, and you can still move after shooting. You can flesh out your troops with new recruits, whom you can level up throughout the game. ![]() You also have several hero characters (two at the start, with two more joining through the game) who sometimes have to on missions and sometimes are optional. However, you can only take four troops on any one mission. Your troops are divided into five classes: nimble Scouts, heavily-armed Heavies, melee-slicing Vanguards, medic-like Supports and long-range Snipers. Your troops go straight onto the battlefield and you can move from cover to cover, looking to outflank the enemy to get the drop on them with your firearms or get close enough to use a grenade. At the start this direct approach is refreshing, with the action focus and no need to worry about other stuff. There's been a few XCOM-alikes which have oddly dropped this feature when it's one of the things that makes XCOM so great, but to be fair a few of them (like the underrated Hard West) have made it work really well. The closest is a brief R&R stop between missions when you can equip troops with the fresh gear you've picked up from the last battlefield, then it's straight back into the turn-based fights. There's no strategic metagame, where you make decisions back at a base. To be clear, Gears Tactics features only half the gameplay of an XCOM-style title. XCOM-inspired, turn-based tactical spin-off? It's an odd choice which ultimately becomes interesting. After five mainline games of fierce action, it was decided to give the series an. The series is infamous for its real-time, intense battles against enemy forces, fought by square-headed, wide men kneeling behind waist-high walls (which the planet Sera is absolutely inundated with for no readily-explainable reason). Gears Tactics is a spin-off from the perennially popular Gears of War series of third-person shooters, which popularised the "cover shooter" school of action games. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |